The model and mindset coach Paul Sculfor. Photo / AP
The British male supermodel Paul Sculfor was huge in the Noughties, but behind the scenes he was battling an addiction that nearly destroyed his life.
It should have been a high point in the supermodel Paul Sculfor’s extraordinary life. He was 33, at the wheel of a Ferrari, a blonde model at his side. “It was the car of my dreams, the girl of my dreams, but I felt completely hollow,” he recalls. “I thought, I’m so unhappy. I’m doing what I think should be me and it doesn’t work.”
This was 20 years ago and Sculfor, the first man to earn the “supermodel” tag, was ubiquitous. The boy from Upminster, glowered over Times Square as the face of Banana Republic, shot by Bruce Weber. His full lips featured in every glossy in the world, puckered up for Christian Dior Tendre Poison. His ripped torso and extraordinary bone structure won him campaigns with Versace, Paul Smith, Armani and Louis Vuitton, to name a few. Attitude magazine pronounced he had “the face that’s worth a million dollars”.
At the peak of 1990s hedonism Sculfor worked with the world’s greatest photographers, had homes in Miami, London and Manhattan and dated some of the world’s most famous women, including Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz, on which more later. “There were private jets, yachts, penthouses, mansions in Beverly Hills, incredibly beautiful women, incredible experiences all the time — it was fantastic!” he says.
Naturally a big “but” is coming. Sculfor had a blast, but over a decade a blast morphed into total implosion. “I’d made it financially. I’d had the girlfriends — all the stuff on paper that as a young man I didn’t think was possible, and I let my guard down a little too much.”
Innately shy, he found booze and drugs warmed him up, so he began consuming by the truckload. “I was trying to gain connections but I was making fair-weather friends. Things got very dark. I was always ill, I developed social anxiety, shut myself off from my family. I turned down jobs because I couldn’t be bothered — very unlike me. My outlook on life changed from being excited to pretty much suicidal. I didn’t want to be myself any more.”
The nadir came in 2004, shortly after his epiphany in the Ferrari. At his Essex flat Sculfor binged several grammes of cocaine and then started driving to a charity event. “Suddenly I slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road and banged my head against the steering wheel. I was having a breakdown.”
He continued to the event, where he “got absolutely blasted” on whisky and wine, then drove home and spent the entire night “hoovering up” even more cocaine. “In the morning I collapsed on the floor in the hall. I came to in the afternoon. I felt, ‘I’m done.’ There was no emotion, no thought process, it was like I’d died. I was exhausted with life.”
A friend drove him to the Priory, where he stayed for six months. Slowly his life turned around. Today Sculfor is sitting in Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, honed and glowing, wearing a Hackett jumper, cream M&S jeans (“Amazing!”) and a Rolex. He’s tanned from a Dubai holiday and charming, even though his jet-lagged daughter has had him up since 4.30am.
Aged 53, he’s still modelling — recent campaigns include N Peal cashmere. But he also practises as a mindset coach and mentors young men with drink and drugs issues. With his wife, the Italian nutritionist Federica Amati, 37 (they have two daughters, aged six and three), he runs Stride Foundation, a charity that educates the public about addiction and provides financial support to help people access rehab. He will shortly launch a podcast discussing addiction.
“I’m passionate about it because I’ve done the study and the crazy eight-hour meditation courses, but I feel men generally don’t understand it’s OK to change, that there’s another place you can go in life. We had four or five people take their lives during Covid — young guys who didn’t have the ability to communicate.”
For decades not communicating was the only way Sculfor knew. He was from a family of old-school, hard-guy East End market traders, and his childhood was full of “fear and anxiety”: he was physically abused by a neighbour, who once put him in a box and jumped up and down on it; his mother spent nine months in hospital with what they thought was cancer (it turned out to be a neurofibroma).
Yet Sculfor is clear he can’t claim these traumas as the cause of his issues. “There’s definitely a genetic component. My grandfather was an alcoholic and a gambler. I feel addiction is almost like an entity that pulls you off the streets and takes you hostage.”
The cliché states that wealth and fame destroy, yet Sculfor is adamant his stellar career was, in fact, his lifeline. “Upminster is cool but it’s small-minded. If I’d stayed there I would have been in trouble much earlier on. Modelling probably saved my life — it opened me up to an explosion of places and nurtured me in so many ways.” After school he worked on building sites and was a keen amateur boxer, as well as a regular on the rave scene, which introduced him to Ecstasy.
He was 21 when his mother secretly entered him for Select Model Management’s model of the year competition. He won (Rod Stewart’s wife, Penny Lancaster, came third in the women’s section — “We’re still friends”). Within weeks he was on his first shoot for The Face with Lisa Snowdon (five years later they dated for two years). From then he was always on an aircraft. “Though, wherever you’d be, you’d always end up shooting in an alleyway,” he says, laughing.
He worked frequently with Linda, Kate, Naomi, Christy et al, but there was no time for deep friendships with them — or anyone. “You’d see people twice a year at fashion weeks and hang out but the rest of the time we were on the road.”
After rehab he gingerly returned to modelling with a new mindset. “I wanted to see if I could make it again, but I also wanted to have a purpose — to help other people in the business that needed recovery.”
He moved to Los Angeles for five years, where he dabbled in acting, but he became best known for dating first Aniston for five months then Diaz for a year. Sculfor is too much of a gent to dish dirt, but he didn’t relish the paparazzi attention. “It got intense, silly. I’d be taking the bins out in an old tracksuit and there’d be a guy with a camera in my face — come on!”
The pull of Blighty was too strong and in 2012 he returned permanently to judge Britain’s Next Top Model with Abbey Clancy. Eight years ago he married Amati. “I found someone who loved me for me, not my job — which happened a lot when I was younger.”
Sculfor is now more contented than he ever imagined possible. He was momentarily shaken recently when he bumped into a photographer he used to work with who told him: “It’s a shame you never made it in life.”
“His metric was fame and fortune, so when he said that, at first I thought, oh yes, I didn’t quite make this or that. But then I wanted to lecture him. I thought, you don’t know what it takes to do the work I’ve done on myself — how many tearful moments and painful experiences I’d gone through to grow.”
He continues: “I’ve had the cars and watches and learnt there’s more to life — honesty and intimacy with friends and loved ones. Now I want to show people you can go through addiction and have a wonderful sober life and still succeed. Because by my metrics I couldn’t be more successful.”
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
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